In the last week several KDE developers delivered short reports about the status of their projects. The first was Wynn Wilkes, who gave a report on the status of Java support in Konqueror. The short version: all applets which can be run the jdk appletviewer should now work, the security manager (sandbox) is in place, and applet loading via proxy and over SSL is now working (for SSL you need the JSSE (Java Secure Sockets Extension)). Next came Lars Knoll, who reported on his progress on better font handling into the Qt PostScript® driver. The improvements concern X displays which have a resolution different from 75dpi, and support for embedded TrueType and Type 1 fonts. Finally, Wynn Wilkes (again) reported that the integration of smblib into the SMB KIO-slave was progressing well.

If I can ever get back in a coding groove, there will be a SMB serving capability (through SAMBA, of course).

My current idea is to write a small proggie associated to he inode/directory mimetype that shares that directory. Or rather, marks it as shareable until someone runs as root a program to collate all shareables into a smb.conf)

The logistics of doing this and not breaking everything while remaining even slightly secure are complex, but I think I have most of the design in my head now.

It will be pretty paranoid (you can only share directories you own, you can not follow symlinks, and a dozen other things).

Well, the mentioned smb ioslave will probably be part of KDE 2.2.
In 2.1 there is also a new smb ioslave, which is more compatible and faster than the one from 2.0, it is a wrapper around smbclient. Unfortunately it is read-only, you can't write to the shares, it would have been unacceptable slow if I had implemented it.

Talking about developing and developers. Is mosfet still employed by MandrakeSoft to work on KDE? I haven't seen much from mosfet for the last 6-7 months. Only a couple of comments on the mailing lists, but not much code-wise. I really miss his work.

Font embedding in Postscript is a VERY useful development. It is very difficult to get something printed nicely from under X in Russian, font metrics are usually spoiled and results are inconsistent.
So thanks for good work and keep it up.

I did not fully understand Lars' report, but
I hope he is addressing the problem where,
in Koffice components, the printed output does
not match the displayed one very well. For
example, the fonts that are used for printing
are quite different from that fonts that are chosen for the display. Furthermore, even though
the display always looks well-formatted, the
printed output looks chopped and blocky. The math
fonts in particular render awfully on paper.